coming together

A pleasingly busy week here, as a wide array of pieces continue to fall into place. After much delay, it appears we’ll have a distribution deal for I Love Your Work locked in the next two weeks, in time to announce at Cannes. Posts for The Best Web Writing are piling up, and should be going in front of the editorial panel shortly. And, on my own book, I just passed the forty page mark, with a strong outline in place for the rest of the (likely distressingly long) volume.

With enough work under my belt, I’m likely to sneak out this evening to the first meeting of a Yale alumni group for theater, film, writing and other artistic types. Most of the other invitees have been emailing with amusement about the event, as the organizer blithely named the group the Creative Yale Alumni Network (or, CYAN – sounds familiar, no?). Imitation, I’m trying to assure myself, must be the sincerest form of flattery.

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back to the books

The very best part of the house in which I grew up was that it sat about a block and a half from the Palo Alto Children’s Library. The library and my house were separated by a single quiet street, and I remember vividly finally being old enough to cross that street alone – it meant I could head to the library whenever I wanted, or, more precisely, whenever I had finished a book. At the time, that meant trips nearly daily.

Walking in the library door, I was treated like a regular at the Four Seasons. Everyone greeted me by name. Recently purchased books I might like were set aside, ready for checking out. By my recommendation, books hidden deep in the shelves were moved to featured positions on the carrols. By the time I moved on to the adult library, I had gone through a stack of library cards, wearing the stripes off each.

I read voraciously through high school as well, pretending to be asleep when my parents would check on me so I could switch the bedside lamp back on and turn page after page until I finally finished a book in the small hours of the morning.

When I hit college, however, my pace slowed dramatically. Certainly, I accumulated a slew of class texts – but as a double major in neuroscience and computer science, there wasn’t much on my shelves that could be mistaken for pleasure reading. What little time and energy I might have had for further reading was eaten up by the companies I was starting, the musical groups with which I was playing, or my burgeoning alcoholism. Between it all, reading, and fiction reading in particular, fell by the wayside.

Post-college, I came back to reading fiction in fits and starts. I’d pick up a book and consume it whole. At its end, though, without another to leap immediately onto, whatever small momentum I had built petered. I’d go several weeks before picking up another novel or short story collection, enjoy it enough to curse myself for falling of the fiction wagon, then again wait several weeks more to start another.

Recently, however, the momentum I needed, the long stretch of one book after another it took to get me back into my old ways, came not from fiction, but rather from business books. Setting out to write one of my own, I piled for re-reading the ten or twelve such books I had drawn on most in my busienss past. Driven by the excitement about my own project, I blew through each with startling speed, taking notes along the way. Suddenly, wherever I was – in the kitchen cooking, riding the subway, waiting for a film screening to start – I had a book in hand, filling errant moments with as many paragraphs as I could sneak in.

Those books finished, and with nothing on my shelves calling out my name, I started invading the collections of my roommates. Both writers, they had each amassed row after row of fiction I’d never read. I’d pick up a book one evening, and by the next find I was 200 pages deep. At the end of each, I’d replace the suddenly lifeless block of paper on their shelves, and pluck out the next.

I’m on my fourth book of the past week. And I can’t help but think those Children’s Library librarians would be rather pleased.

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a really bad party

“I want to give a really bad party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.”
– Dick Diver, in Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night

With six months passed since our Halloween throw-down, the inimitable Hell’s Kitchen Museum of Curious Deaths, we’ve decided it’s high time for another soiree. So, in honor of this year’s Mother’s Day, on Saturday, May 8th (Mother’s Day Eve), we’ll be holding The Mother of All Parties.

We had a bit of trouble copying the invite list across, so if you’ve been invited to parties past but haven’t yet received an Evite for this one, if you haven’t been invited to parties past but should have, or if we’ve never met but you suspect you could do Dick Diver proud with your contribution to such a party, certainly let me know.

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helpful note

If you have a female caller on a weekend evening, and she finds a business card on your desk with a different female’s name and phone number scrawled on the back, she likely will not be terribly amused.

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inculcation

Over the past few months, along with my extracurricular trumpet playing, I’ve also started to do a bit of trumpet teaching. Helping students quickly improve is immensely vicariously satisfying, as I remember all too vividly my own struggles through the years trying to wrangle beautiful sounds from these little coils of brass.

Oddly, I’ve discovered that much of what made learning to play the trumpet difficult for me has made teaching it vastly easier. While many of the pros I play with now were naturals, I had to struggle for every small step I took forward, and the exercises and approaches that were most helpful to me seem to be similarly successful for other trumpeters – young and old – facing the same problems.

Along with the usual sorts of students – high school kids working their way up the band seating order, or adult players who put the horn down for a few decades before realizing they wanted to come back to it – I’ve also found a couple with considerably stranger stories.

One, for example, heard an NPR piece about the shortage of buglers available to play Taps at military funerals (a problem worsening as increasing numbers of WW2 veterans pass away). The piece mentioned a group called Bugles Across America (to which I belong), that helps family members find volunteer trumpet players willing to play Taps. She went to the site, and decided to learn trumpet well enough to join the group. Somewhere along the way, she also got hooked on the instrument in general, and is now trying to make up for lost time, bringing her beginning-level playing to the point where she can eventually play with small community groups.

Another woman emailed to say she was dating a trumpet player (God help her!), that his birthday was coming up, and that she wanted to try learning some basic music to play as a birthday surprise. I suggested Happy Birthday as well as the relatively simple (and romantically appropriate) My Funny Valentine, then set her to work.

Mainly, though, I’m happiest to see the progress my slightly more experienced students are making. If they keep up their current paces, they should be beating me out for gigs in the not-to-distant future, and I know I’ll be secretly thrilled.

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feeling exposed

Had a rehearsal last night with the New York Centre Symphony for a rather intimidating upcoming concert, which includes Bernstein’s Westside Story, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, and the Milhaud Percussion Concerto – all rather trumpet-heavy pieces. The 1812, for example, is scored for four trumpets – two Eb trumpets and two cornets. Yesterday, however, due to schedule conflicts throughout the rest of the section, I was the only trumpet player to show up.

Playing principal in the group, I’d become used to being the most audible part in the section, though I wasn’t quite as prepared to play as the only part in the section. I hadn’t previously realized, for example, that in multiple places in the 1812, the entire orchestra stops playing, aside from the trumpets (or in this case, trumpet) who repeatedly play an extended, loud, high, and rather technically difficult fanfare.

I cannot possibly convey the initial feelings of terror upon my discovering this fact, which largely involved me playing at the top of my lungs over dead silence throughout the rest of the room. Still, despite the initial shock, it went much better than I would have expected, at least given the unintendedly soloistic nature of the playing. Following the piece, the conductor looked over to me, laughed, and said, “well, now at least I know you can play your part!”

[Note to self: next time, learn to play the viola or some other quiet instrument that hides well within a large, rather anonymous section.]

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brain dump

While I’m already knee deep in putting together Cyan’s web writing anthology, and have for years written blog posts, short articles, screenplays, etc., I’ve never really tried to put together an entire book full, several hundred pages worth, of my own thinking on a single subject. So, after much prodding to do so by people I’ve worked with over the years, I finally sat down to outline Radical Entrepreneurship and see if I could think of anything worthwhile to say.

I started by laying out some broad chapter topics – the importance of building a network, where to find ideas, how to raise capital, building a team, etc. And then I started adding in sub-chapter headings, as well as tips and ideas I could touch on within each. My initial fear was that I wouldn’t have enough worthwhile things to say about starting companies to really fill a book. As anyone who’s met me in real life can attest, however, I’m rarely low on words, and apparently that carries over to writing as well. My outline, which started short of a single page, is now close to eleven, and I find I’m constantly remembering other things I should add in. Before, I was concerned I’d end up with a 50 page book; now, I’m concerned I’ll end up with a Harry Potter-sized 800 pager.

Carpal tunnel syndrome, here I come.

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booking it

Sorry about the relative quiet recently; the writing part of my brain has been otherwise occupied, drafting up the outline and first few chapters of a book on entrepreneurship, tentatively titled Radical Entrepreneurship: Guerilla Startup Tactics from the Real World.

Considering the completeness of the outline, and the relative ease of non-personal nonfiction writing, I should be able to flesh the book out to a few hundred pages rather quickly. More concerning, however, is my ability to balance that writing with keeping the blog alive, something worthwhile less for your ongoing amusement than for my ongoing sanity.

In case you’re curious, here’s the (still very rough) preface, that should give you some sense of what the project is all about.

Preface: What is Radical Entrepreneurship?

The word ëradicalí is an odd one, as it means two wildly different things. Coming from the Latin word for root (radix), it initially referred to the juice in fruits and vegetables, and by extension to the very essence, the core substance of things. Then, as the word evolved, ëradicalí took on a second meaning: extreme and unusual. Given those two opposing definitions, ëradicalí is a great word to apply to the style of entrepreneurship laid out in this book. On the one hand, Radical Entrepreneurship is about the core tasks of starting a company, the simple steps, small details, and nitty gritty of actually making a startup work. On the other, because so few people talk about those things, really lay them out in careful detail, some of the ideas presented may initially seem rather unorthodox.

Still, most of the strategies and tactics in this book are of the ëwhy didn’t I already think of that?í variety. I know, because I didnít think of most of them, at least when starting my first company. (Or, in some cases, even when starting my second or third or fourthÖ) Instead, I learned them the hard way, one mistake, and one subsequent climb back to success, at a time. Itís an ugly way to learn, but it works. Along those lines, thereís a great story about a young man who goes to a very prosperous older man to ask for advice:

ìWhatís the most important thing in life?î the young man asks.

ìGood judgment,î replies the older man.

ìAnd how do I get that?î the young man continues.

ìExperience,î replies the old man.

ìBut how do I get that?î persists the young man.

ìBad judgment,î concludes the old man.

That pretty much sums up this book. The things I present here arenít armchair theories that sound good, or business-school textbook truisms; theyíre the things that actually worked for me in building and selling companies, the good judgments I learned through years of bad judgments. Most of the successful entrepreneurs I know initially seem to have made largely the same bad judgments in their own companies. Therefore, Iím hoping that, by reading this book, and by putting the advice it contains into action, you can avoid making those same bad judgments yourself. That way, youíll be free to pioneer new and wildly creative bad judgments instead. Which is basically what entrepreneurship is all about.

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trumpeting

No real posts today or tomorrow, as I’m up at the SUNY Purchase Conservatory of Music for the New York Brass Conference. Lots of great concerts (including one by my old trumpet teacher at Yale), masterclasses, and other fun trumpet stuff. Apologies to non-brass-playing readers.

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